The Film That Shocked Rector (18 March 1977)

I like talking with young people.  They teach me a lot. Oh yes, they do!  They have a better grasp of some aspects of 20^th century life than I will ever have.  And they can cause me to question the validity of some notions which for practically all my days I have held to be self-evident truths.

On the other hand, I do find them taking for granted many things, large and small, which they would not take for granted if they were only a little older.

For instance, what youngster today up to the age of 30 doubts that the local cinema will be open on a Sunday?  Very few, I’ll wager. So they may be surprised to know that in 1947 it took Parliament itself to allow cinemas in Bletchley to open on Sundays.

Bletchley was by no means unusual.  Before the war very few cinemas opened on Sundays, although many wished to do so.  They war wrought the change.  Sundays found thousands of servicemen and women and war workers mooching around strange towns with little better to do than overcrowd the pubs until the drink supply ran out.

It was a potentially explosive situation and it was relieved in part by a special defence regulation permitting cinemas to open.

The regulation remained in force for some time after the war.  Then it came to an end and towns had to apply to Parliament if they wished Sunday opening to continue in their districts.

A public meeting was called in Bletchley in February, 1947.  It was held at the Bletchley Road senior school hall.  And after a long and sometimes heated discussion a vote was taken and resulted:  For Sunday opening 229:  against 42: “undecided” 79.

But that vote was not the decider.  A proper poll had to be held and was held only a week or two later.  This straight ballot resulted:  For Sunday opening 2,122; against 328.

It was reported at the time that average Sunday audiences at the two Bletchley cinemas totalled about 1,200.

Parliament OK’d Bletchley’s application in May of that year.

I have no record of the date when the defence regulations actually ended for the country as a whole, but some idea of the heat engendered in some quarters by the Sunday opening question may be gathered from comments made by the Rector of Drayton Parslow, the Rev. Mr Pulford, in his parish magazine the following year.

Mr Pulford wrote that when he was a young man he decided that, as a Christian, one of the things he had to let alone was “pictures”.  But this year he had made an exception and, selecting a picture theatre at random, had paid his 1s 9d and gone in.

“I am not particularly squeamish and it takes a good deal to shock me,” he wrote.  “But what I saw could not be more accurately described than in the words of the Bible:  ‘earthly, sensual, devilish.’

“The film contained no plot.

“It consisted of one long protracted period of suggestive immorality. It was an exhibition of licence and lust for its own sake.  It was calculated to whip up the natural instincts and affections implanted by God and to divert them into illegitimate channels.  It cheapened purity and honour and represented immorality as normal and inevitable.

“I sat through about a third part of it, hoping every minute it would make a change for the better, but it did not, so I walked out, filled with a sense of utter loathing and revulsion.

“Regarding Sunday cinemas, well!  We all know that each town settles it by the vote.  But the film industry, like the liquor trade, knows well enough which way the majority will vote.

“The vote has for long been recognised as an easy constitutional and ‘democratic’ ruse by means of which the public can get what the industry wants it to have.  It acts upon the false assumption that the majority must be right.

“That assumption takes us back to a certain green hill far away where the majority voted for the death of Jesus Christ.  Were they right?”

Mr Pulford did not name the film – no doubt because he did not wish to advertise it to those who might have been attracted thereby.  But I cannot remember hearing of any film of 30 years ago that merited such a fulmination.

As for his reference to democracy, I too have doubts about its value as a guide to good taste.  But I guess you don’t have to go into a cinema if you don’t like the look of the advertising material outside.